her sake.  There were continual plots hatched against the stern rule of Richelieu, cabals and conspiracies without number were entered upon, but none of them resulted in anything.  Richelieu knew very well what was going on, and he realized perfectly that Ninon’s drawing-rooms were the center of every scheme concocted to drag him down and out of the dominant position he was holding against the combined nobility of France.  But he never took a step toward suppressing her little court as a hot-bed of restlessness, he rather encouraged her by his silence and his indifference.  Complaints of her growing coterie of uneasy spirits brought nothing from him but:  “As long as they find amusements they are not dangerous.”  It was the forerunner of Napoleon’s idea along the same line:  “We must amuse the people; then they will not meddle with our management of the government.”

It is preposterous to think of this minister of peace, this restless prelate, half soldier, half pastor, meddling in all these cabals and seditious schemes organized for his own undoing, but nevertheless, he was really the fomenter of all of them.  They were his devices for preventing the nobility from combining against him.  He set one cabal to watch another, and there was never a conspiracy entered into that he did not prepare a similar conspiracy through his numerous secret agents and thus split into harmless nothings and weak attempts what would have been fatal to a continuance of his power.  His tricks were nothing but the ordinary everyday methods of the modern ward politician making the dear people believe he is doing one thing when he is doing another.  The stern man pitted one antagonist against another until both sued for peace and pardon.  The nobility were honest in their likes and dislikes, but they did not understand double dealings and therefore the craft of Richelieu was not even suspected.

Soon he corrupted by his secret intrigues the fidelity of the nobles and destroyed the integrity of the people.  Then it was, as Cyrano says:  “The world saw billows of scum vomited upon the royal purple and upon that of the church.”  Vile rhyming poets, without merit or virtue, sold their villainous productions to the enemies of the state to be used in goading the people to riot.  Obscene and filthy vaudevilles, defamatory libels and infamous slanders were as common as bread, and were hurled back and forth as evidence of an internecine strife which was raging around the wearer of the Roman scarlet, who was thereby justified in continuing his ecclesiastical rule to prevent the wrecking of the throne.